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Department of Computer Science celebrate 50th anniversary of moon landing

moon_base

MSG Lunar Base
To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, Dr Anastasia Anagnostou and Professor Simon Taylor from the Modelling and Simlation Group (MSG) have developed the MSG Lunar Base to demonstrate LED visualisation with Raspberry Pis. The lights show various states and interactions between the settlements and a resupply base in the centre. Four Pis and four 60 LED strips were used with the Adafruit Neopixel library. The buildings were built from TTCombat’s Sci Fi Utopia range. All wiring, programming, painting, and building were done by Anastasia and Simon. This is the basis for future distributed computing, Internet of Things and simulation demonstrations (especially the Simulation Exploration Experience) as well as new data visualisation.

View the video of our Lunar Base here

Importantly the MSG Lunar Base is a test bed for simulation and distributed computing. Near term projects include:

- Development of a mixed language (Python and Java) Client-server game
- Deployment as a HLA Federation
- Development of an agent-based simulation (REPAST)
- Development of an IoT gateway

New hardware will be added (e.g. LED matrix, control panels, sensors, etc.) and we will grow the base as more people become interested. Get in touch if you want to collaborate!